An «Ecological» component should be an inalienable part of the foreign language study program

Conserving the environment is a crucial issue for both Ecological science professionals and all citizens, regardless of their occupation or location. It is widely agreed that education is key to successfully addressing this issue. An urgent need exists to implement large-scale environmental education that starts from kindergarten and continues throughout life. Now in the third millennium environmental education should become a necessary component of education at large.

The nation's backbone is its youth. Since the future belongs to the young people it is they who can and should actively contribute to preserving and enhancing the environment because the youth of today are the future opinion leaders and decision makers. The future health of the planet rests with them. That’s why it’s so important to get them interested and engaged in environmental issues early on in their lives.

The subject "foreign language" has great opportunities for strengthening various directions of education of a harmoniously developed personality, including ecological, designed to form a careful attitude to nature as a social and personal value. «Ecological” component should be an inalienable part of Foreign Language study program.

Teachers of English and German conducting classes in the faculty of Chemistry and Chemical technology are actively working to promote ecological education of students through various techniques and methods. Firstly, ecological component is integrated into the Foreign language Study Program (UMKD). Ecological education of students is implemented in class as well as outside the classroom, in the form of conferences, project works, discussions, writing essays, etc. Our teachers practice a variety of techniques and methods that can effectively realize ecological education of students. It should be noted that the process of ecological education simultaneously envisages the development of foreign language communicative skills, namely presentation skills, the skills to participate in debates, doing projects and giving talks on the results of the project topic, etc. For example, our teachers practice an interesting technique called "3-minute talk" on an ecological topic that students prepare for each lesson. During the lesson, they give the talk and after each student's speech, the classmates give their comprehensive evaluation of the topic of the talk, the way the content was related, the grammar mistakes made by the presenter, and the vocabulary used. For each the classmates' evaluation serves as a good stimulus to improve the quality of the 3-minute talk in terms of explaining the content of the talk, intonation, pronunciation, and choice of vocabulary so that everyone can understand.

One major event which our teachers hold annually is a round table conference on different topics. Starting from the last 2003-04 academic year the decision was taken to devote the conference to the discussion of environmental issues. So, on March 30.2023 the Chemical Faculty teachers successfully organized an International Round Table Conference on the topic: Clean water, sanitation, affordable and clean energy are necessary conditions for human race existence. We were happy to welcome our international guest speakers from Turkey Yağmur Bengisu Güngör (Eskişehir Technical University, Moscow,Russia, a teacher of physics and robotics, Igor Vladimirovich Trunov ( Public Secondary School 73), Maria Igorevna Trunova ( Scientific and Research University). Among conference participants were GaukharBissengaliyeva (Burdur Mehmet Akif Esroy University, Turkey), Gaukhar Zhakimova ( University of Milan, Italy) and Zhanar Kairova (Simon Fraser University, Canada). The roundtable conference was successful, as all speakers provided informative and engaging presentations in English, German and Russian. The conference was concluded with the idea that human beings are comprised of water, salts, and cells. Water is our precious gift! We cannot survive on Earth without water, so we must all do our part to take care of it.

 In the current academic year the conference topic is “Revitalizing global partnership for sustainable development». Now we are getting ready with the preparation of the conference program.

D.M. Makhmetova,

K.A.Zhirenshina,

Foreign Language Department senior teachers